Smart meters provide an ability to monitor resource consumption at respective resource consumption nodes, for example, electrical or other energy usage in a home, business, or other location, in a more detailed and granular manner than under prior approaches. Whereas, a traditional meter might have a single value (e.g., kilowatt-hours, cubic feet, etc.) read manually from time-to-time, a smart meter may be configured to report consumption and other attributes at much more frequent and regular intervals, such as hourly.
Traditionally, problems with energy or other resource usage, such as downed lines, damaged equipment, fraud or other theft of the resource, etc. have been difficult to detect and have required extensive resources to address. For example, a utility worker and associated vehicle may have to be dispatched to investigate a reported problem, and such a report may only be received if a consumer or other person happens to notice a problem.
Aggregate (e.g., monthly) usage values have been compared to detected and flag significant changes in resource consumption, such as comparing consumption in a particular month in the current year to corresponding consumption by the same consumer in a prior year, but in current approaches it may be difficult to determine without costly effort (e.g., by a human operator) that the change in consumption as compared to a corresponding period in a prior year is indicative of a problem and if so the nature of the problem and how it should be addressed.